Chapter 40: Finding Leonard
New York CityThe West Side
Adam dropped his bag in a budget hotel room, looked at his wallet, and did the math.
The math was not encouraging.
Back in Galveston he'd had a general sense of where his money was. Out here, it was disappearing in ways he hadn't fully anticipated. Gas. Food. Water. Parking. The hotel itself. Everything in New York cost more than it did anywhere else, and he was going to be living here for four years starting in the fall.
Four years of high school with Hard Candy had netted him around ten thousand dollars total. The majority of that had come through Gretchen — legitimately, through performances and actual tutoring sessions. He'd eventually had to stop charging for the tutoring when the situation became complicated enough that taking money felt wrong, which he regretted from a purely financial standpoint.
Ten thousand dollars, which was roughly three months of average American wages and a genuinely impressive amount for a high school student, had partially evaporated. The road trip with Jennifer and her friends — driving American pickup trucks, which consumed gasoline at a rate that bordered on a personal insult — had cost two thousand dollars in fuel alone.
He'd turned down the two thousand his father Bob had offered for this trip, which he didn't regret. The Duncan family had baby Charlie's expenses, Gabe's regular requirement for damage control funding, and Teddy's college applications coming up. Adam had stepped into a family that wasn't originally his, and the least he could do was not make it harder on them financially.
Columbia hadn't offered him a scholarship, but a financial aid counselor had helped him navigate a student loan. Living expenses were a separate problem he was going to have to solve himself.
The most urgent problem, though, wasn't money.
It was getting his intelligence past 140.
He was at 138.25. The genius threshold was 140. At current rates from Juno, Sheldon, and Paige combined, he'd cross it in about 117 days.
117 days was too long. He needed a faster path.
Which brought him to Leonard Hofstadter.
Adam sat on the edge of the hotel bed and worked through the logic.
Leonard definitely existed — Sheldon existed, and Sheldon and Leonard's histories were intertwined in ways that couldn't function without both of them present.
Leonard was roughly Sheldon's age, which put him at twelve or thirteen right now. His family was in New Jersey, which was adjacent to New York. Adam could be there tomorrow.
Leonard's IQ was 173. Not Sheldon or Paige level, but genuinely exceptional. Based on the pattern the system had established, the first contact boost would be significant — probably somewhere between Juno's one point and Paige's six, with Sheldon's five as a reasonable midpoint reference.
Whatever Leonard contributed on first contact, combined with the ongoing daily accumulation from the existing three, would push him past 140 faster than waiting alone would.
The other Big Bang Theory cast members were either geographically impractical or had too little information attached to them. Howard was in Pasadena. Raj's family was in India. Bernadette and Amy had almost no locating information in what Adam remembered. Leonard was the only one where the variables were manageable.
And Leonard had a detail that made finding him specifically easier than it should have been: his high school bully.
The bully — big, loud, football player, the kind of prominent social figure who was impossible to miss at any high school — looked exactly like a certain actor Adam recognized from the Young Sheldon cast. Adam had seen enough photos at the Cooper house to have a solid visual reference. The bully would be easy to spot. Leonard would be near him, unfortunately.
Leonard's mother was a published neuroscientist and author — findable through academic directories if the school search didn't work. His father was a sociologist. Growing up in that household, with that IQ, Leonard would have gravitated toward one of the top public high schools in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Adam had a plan.
He set his alarm, lay back, and stared at the ceiling for a while.
Tomorrow, New Jersey.
Bergen County, New JerseyWestfield High School
The football team was running drills in the side yard when Adam arrived. He scanned the group and found who he was looking for within about forty-five seconds — tall, broad, exactly the face he'd expected, currently directing the kind of casual cruelty that popular high school athletes had been directing at smaller kids since the beginning of American public education.
Specifically: a group of players had cornered a small boy with glasses near the equipment shed. The boy's expression was resigned in the particular way of someone who had been through this enough times that the acute misery had settled into something more chronic.
Adam watched for a moment, then walked over.
"Hey."
The group looked at him. He was a stranger, which bought him about three seconds of confused pause.
Adam used them. "Which one of you is the team captain?"
The big kid — the one Adam had recognized — straightened up. "That's me."
"Cool." Adam looked at him with the specific expression of someone making an evaluation. "Coach sent me. He wants you on the field."
The pause stretched.
"Which coach?"
"The one who's waiting," Adam said. "You want me to go back and tell him you had other things going on?"
The group dispersed. The big kid went, throwing one look back that promised the conversation with the small boy wasn't finished, just paused.
The small boy with glasses straightened up and blinked at Adam.
"Thanks," he said.
"Leonard Hofstadter?" Adam said.
Leonard blinked again. "Yeah. Do I know you?"
"Not yet," Adam said. "My name's Adam Duncan. I'm from Texas. I think we should talk."
End of Chapter 40
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